


Meet Me On The River

by Nevcolleil



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Oculus - Freeform, Post Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 14:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6911305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Oculus was a conduit through which all moments of time could be seen and accessed simultaneously - so of course, <i>of course</i>, blowing himself up inside of it didn’t just kill him like a good, old-fashioned shiv might've done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meet Me On The River

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at 3 am, purging emotions about this latest TV-induced trauma. Judge the coherence and quality of the fic herein with this in mind.

After living on a _time and space_ ship for five months, not to mention living alongside people with _literal superpowers_ for longer than that, Len will admit that he probably should have seen this coming. 

Or he would if admitting so _now_ wouldn’t be a truly inexcusable pun... 

(Okay, so make that he _definitely_ will.)

Len’s seen the Michael Keaton-as-Batman movies, after all. He should have known how death works in a world full of superheroes and metahumans, speedsters with savior complexes and Time Lords who timeknap old friends.

The Oculus was a conduit through which all moments of time could be seen and accessed simultaneously - so of course, _of course_ , blowing himself up inside of it didn’t just kill him like a good, old-fashioned shiv might’ve done.

(Speaking of which, Len thinks he’s lived and and relived the moment he and Mick first met about eight billion times now, each.) 

He tries to- to _stream_ , he’s not sure what else to call it, away from moments like those as much as possible, so he hasn’t spent near as much “time”, for lack of a better word, in that exact moment as a lot of others. Not that the moment he met Mick Rory doesn’t hold a significant amount of sentimental value to Len - but any instance where a quick reaction time and the potential for making some slight change to what he said, what he did, the first time around is bad news for Len. 

Len once froze up in the middle of a night when he was thirteen because he didn’t stream away fast enough - and then didn’t react as fast as he had before, when this had originally happened - and ended up with nearly two years of new moments to wade back through and unmake. Just a second’s difference in how quickly Len had leapt between the beer bottle his father had hurled across the living room and his crying sister, and Lisa had temporarily faced the future with a lazy eye. With a scar that made her hair part funny once it all grew in and mocked him every time he sat down to gather and braid her piggy tails.

Len’s much more careful now - if the word ‘ _now_ ’ means any more than the words ‘ _time_ ’ or ‘ _future_ ’, ‘present’ or ‘past’.

To keep himself sane, Len learns to think of it all this way:

He can access all moments, all times, simultaneously like a living (somewhat), breathing (perhaps?) Oculus, but he can choose not to walk in any one of them.

To say that he _sees_ these moments unfold around him while he isn’t in them would be like saying you can stand in the middle of a rushing river and not get wet. Len experiences, somehow, everything he’s ever experienced- not over and over again, which would imply some sort of order, some sequence of events - but _more_ than he had before he’d “died”. He feels everything he’s ever felt, thinks every thought he’s ever thought, with added commentary he’s learned the hard way not to add out loud. (He calls moving “away” from a particular moment ‘streaming’ and moving “back” into a moment he intends to undo ‘wading’ because undoing time feels exactly like being in that rushing river - and trying to swim back against the current. It’s unpleasant. Incredibly so every time’s he’s had to go back and not talk about red streaks and cold guns, and immortal reincarnations, until someone’s locked him up and medicated him.)

But Len can access any one of these moments - he can access _all_ of them, not just experiencing but _interacting_ , except that the one time he’s tried he thinks he almost killed himself again, whatever death means for him now. He did some version of blacking out, all the moments of his life stilling and muting around him and wavering, like a dam had been dropped on the flow fueling his own personal river.

It takes him ages to get the hang of simply _being_. Eons maybe. He starts referring to himself, as he is - if he, technically _is_ \- as Oculus, simply so he doesn’t confuse himself with his own pronouns in his head. The Len who lived the time he now treads is ‘Len’ or ‘ _he_ ’ and Oculus is he, himself.

He learns to spot moments touched by time travel - not time travel _he_ was a part of - like spotting individual pieces of debris caught in the river as they rush past him.

He’s generally too careful to try walking in them - plays out each instance just as _he_ would have, like he’s unaware of the floodwaters rising around him.

The first time Mick comes to see him - his Mick, come to see _him_ but talk to him - is harder than any other.

He’s never seen his partner so open. So vulnerable.

And of course Mick’s travelled back to see _him_ during one of their rough patches.

For a moment Oculus thinks Len might just be about to hear something Len had never let himself think about long enough to hope for. “You’re the best guy I ever knew,” Mick’s gruff voice is almost, but not quite, just a rumble in the noise of the bar where they sit. He won’t look Len in the eye, and Oculus is simultaneously mourning the abject misery he (at least) sees clearly on Mick’s face, standing next to the Oculus device apologizing for what he’s about to (what he once, long ago) do, and twirling a tarnished strip of metal around his pinky finger for the first time, back at his safehouse after Mick’s gone home and won’t see.

“I’m not the touchy feely type...” Len says, and Oculus has never wanted to hurt _him_ so much in all of his existence.

“...you’re a hero to me,” Mick tells him. “Got it?”

Entire futures of possibilities stretch out before him, but Oculus has never walked in a changed moment he didn’t change himself. If he tries and he loses focus, even for the span of a thought, he could wade back and fix anything that may go wrong for himself, but he has no way of knowing how he might affect Mick.

“I got it,” Len says, and Oculus lets Mick walk away. That cheap, beat up ring sits in Len’s pocket. Has ever since _he_ and Mick split up this time, will until they meet back up again about six months from-

A rapid surge of something bubbles along the surface of his river, like ripples spreading out from an ice floe suddenly broken free from the burg it once was a part of.

Oculus watches moments, small and insignificant but real - true to his initial timeline - sink and dissolve in the rush and new ones trickle into their place.

His timeline has changed. In one small and insignificant way - nothing that ultimately makes any real difference, but Len calls Mick in three months rather than waiting for Mick to come back to him in six. Mick acts like their little “heart to heart” in the bar never happened, and the current of Len’s time flows forward from that point just as it always has.

_But a change has been made._

And nothing and no one has been hurt. Mick visits him again - before 2013 for _him_ but after as a stream - and the final puzzle of how Oculus can use his new state of being to find some dry land in the middle of this goddamned time river is finally on its way to being solved.

With every trip Mick takes to talk to him through _him_ , a solution becomes clearer, and it isn’t so long after that first visit (not that time has length for Oculus, has anything equal to a start or an end) Len finds himself in 2013 - and 2014, and 2011, and - over a phoneline so Len can’t see how Mick isn’t the age he ought to be - 1998, smiling in anticipation.

One thing Len knew long before Oculus relived the lesson unceasingly is that there isn’t anything you can’t get a handle on eventually. In a world of superheroes and supervillains, apparently even life and death and unexpected superpowers fall into that category.

Not that the word ‘eventually’ means much in the way of limitations for Oculus - for _Len_ \- these days.

Time _is_ on his side, after all. After everything.


End file.
